Black Pride & Historical Trauma - Exploring Genres of Black Diaspora Literature

Last school year, I was excited to introduce my seventh grade students to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Teaching at an all boys military academy, I had carefully selected texts that would give students a broad understanding of American society during different historical periods, while also giving them stories of young people whose lives or personalities they could relate to. I deliberately chose to balance the curriculum between male and female authors and male and female characters, knowing that while at the moment they were surrounded by male role models, they would eventually need to be able to empathize and understand women, whether in their families, love lives or work force. I chose Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in particular, because I loved it and thought they too would love the character of Cassie with all her spunk and refusal to be put down by her environment. While Cassie wasn’t able to escape the prejudices of her society, she and her brothers did find creative ways to punch back at their racist environment. Sometimes literally. I figured the boys would enjoy her rebelliousness and zeal for life as much as I did. 

Thus, I was dismayed when my students started complaining they didn’t like the book. Upon investigation as to why, I learned that all of the boys who didn’t “like” the book, were not actually reading it. As it turned out, they hadn’t really read the previous book outside of class either, but the first book of the semester was Wonder by R.J. Palacio and they had all had a chance to watch the wonderful movie with Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson, so they could more or less follow along with class discussions without having to do any of the reading homework. When we read the chapters for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in class, they seemed to begin to enjoy it, but then one student declared that he had read the description on the back of the book that praised the novel as showing “the rich inner rewards of black pride, love and independence.” As a young white Jewish kid whose family was currently based in Florida, he didn’t see how that was supposed to interest him. He explained, “I already know about slavery, so I don’t need to read it.”

“I already know about slavery…” I had been away from teaching for about six years before this, and I had forgotten how small a seventh grader’s world could be. How do you even begin to explain a lifetime of learning and reading books by black authors and about black literature and the vast experience of African-Americans and the black diaspora to a seventh grader? After I had a day to get over my frustration and reflect on this, I started by giving my students background on why I had chosen the book in the first place and what it had in common with Wonder, which we’d already read, and the other books to come - Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne  Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Each of these books was a coming of age story, each of the characters was flawed, but interesting, and delightful, yet each came from a different cross section of America and grew up at a different time. I wanted them to draw connections between the characters and the themes. 

Next, I enlisted the help of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s speech The Danger of a Single Story in which she explains much better than I ever could how important a diversity of stories are to understanding not only the experience of the black diaspora, but the human experience. This introduction worked and I employed the same strategy for my tenth graders before we read A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah.

That said after reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, I find myself stuck with an expression that echoes the sentiments of that seventh grader and what purveyors of work by black artists - black and white alike - object to and have objected to for years - what I’ve heard referred to as “trauma porn.” I believe the concept was first brought to my attention surrounding the movie, 12 Years a Slave and the #oscarssowhite movement. In 2021, “Monique Jones, entertainment journalist at Just Add Color and Mediaversity Reviews” explained, "’Just the idea of Black trauma in general is a big deal with how Black people are seen by the Academy … when there's so much more to being a Black person in America than just the traumatic side.’" (ScrippsNews.com)

Are stories about black trauma inherently “trauma porn,” though? According to WriteInclusion.org the expression “refers to art or media that exploits the pain, suffering, and brutalization of marginalized people for the sake of entertainment. These depictions cater to non-marginalized viewers and characters rather than exploring the experience, situation, or POV of the person(s) being victimized.” By this definition, Gyasi’s Homegoing does not fall under the definition of “trauma porn” in that she does dive deeply into the points of view of her characters - two sisters and their descendants - one from the lineage of black slavers in the Gold Coast and the other following the lineage of the sister sold into slavery in the United States. Yet chapter after chapter her characters are ostracized, enslaved, kidnapped, exploited, and abused. Of the dozens of characters, only the few near the end experience any glimmer of hope. As a reader I would go through the emotional cycles of hope and despair with the characters, so that at the end of the book, I wondered, what have I learned here about life? Is it really just an endless cycle of humans being horrible to other humans? Of women suffering at the hands of men? Of infidelity, rejection, mental health issues? Inescapable generational trauma? 

What nags at me, is that this is the book that was recommended by my son’s English teacher to him. Meanwhile, I have surrounded him with literature by African and African-American authors, or rather I have immersed myself in diverse literature and steered myself and him in the last few years towards black fantasy or magical realism novels. Favorites have included Kwame Mbalia’s Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky, Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch series, as well as The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bones series. I’ve even created my own African superhero origin story Song of the Ituri. These books, like Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, all share in common the ideas of “black pride, love, and independence” as the praise for Mildred D. Taylor’s novel received. They also, as I mentioned, fall into the genres of fantasy or magical realism, with the exception of Taylor’s work which is a realistic novel, and yet interweaves outcomes that one might categorize as wishful thinking in that the black protagonists find a way to get their revenge against their tormentors without severe consequence to themselves. I am drawn to these stories of pretend worlds and magical possibilities in which black characters have power and choice. None of these books are conflict or obstacle free, but all of them include characters who have agency. In Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing many of the characters seem to have agency for the briefest of moments, and then they succumb to some seemingly preordained tragic fate, so that their individual choice appears a futile mirage. 

This lack of control is so different from the enduring tragedies of Shakespeare and Sophocles. Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus Rex, Antigone – I have taught my share of tragedies. Macbeth had it coming to him, Romeo and Juliet were fools born in foolish families, Antigone chose her path, and Creon and Oedipus in their self-righteousness paved the way for their own losses. As audiences to these dramas, we find catharsis in their tragic endings, because the characters make deliberate choices that they know will have fatal consequences. In a way, the characters' deaths are for the audience's gain – that cathartic release so often written about. 

So why does Homegoing in particular appeal to so many with Ta-Nehisi Coates calling it an “inspiration” and Trevor Noah describing it as “a beautiful story” according to the accolades on the cover and inside of the book’s 2017 edition? The writing is sublime, of course. As I mentioned earlier, Gyaasi takes the reader on a journey with the characters and even considering each chapter follows a different character on two separate continents, I found myself invested in each one’s life, hoping for a better outcome, and cheering them on when they did shun societal expectations and set out on their own. I didn’t love when they were drowned by missionaries or married slave traders, but I certainly cared. The ability to make a reader care about your characters is the hallmark of a strong story. 

In The Color Purple by Alice Walker, upon heading for Africa to work as a missionary, the character Nettie observes, “Today the people of Africa—having murdered or sold into slavery their strongest folks—are riddled by disease and sunk in spiritual and physical confusion….Why did they sell us? How could they have done it? And why do we still love them?” In many ways, Homegoing seems to be a response to these questions, an extension to these thoughts. Gyaasi’s African-born protagonists are slave trade adjacent, none of them individually slave traders, but rather married to slave traders, or the African son and nephew of both black and white slave traders, just enough distance to have empathy for them, but close enough that they are still karmically punished for either their own or their parents’ infidelities or associations with slavery. Meanwhile, the sister sold into slavery in America and her descendants become stuck in a cycle of freedom and captivity. Until the African Americans in the narrative achieve liberation in their own skin, their African counterparts continue to suffer as well. Rather than a redemptive story in the vein of The Color Purple, reading Homegoing has the feel of watching a marble circle around and around a spiraling chute, making slow progress towards eventual release only after doubling back on itself again and again and again. 

I didn’t love reading Homegoing, because as much as I was invested in the characters it didn’t make me feel good. Truth often doesn’t. I am reminded, however, how important it is to reflect on the horrors of history by a recent article in the New York Times, “Trump Says Smithsonian Focuses Too much on ‘How Bad Slavery Was’” in which reporter Zolan Kanno-Young cites Trump’s social media post in which the president wrote, “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” The future, of course, is fiction, we aren’t there yet. History, reality, isn’t pretty. Slavery should not make us feel good. Real life doesn’t always have happy endings. Books like Homegoing are necessary to remind us not just of our history, but of that lack of agency that marginalized groups and individuals have had. We need to understand the horrors that man is capable of doing unto man in order to recognize and prevent and hold accountable individuals and societies as they inch towards these ends so as to not see it before it is too late. The second part of that presidential tweet is, “This Country cannot be WOKE, because WOKE IS BROKE.” Let me say that again, “This Country cannot be WOKE.” The leader of the United States of America, prefers his country with their eyes shut, he wants citizens to be asleep and ignorant. To know our history is to be awake, to have our eyes open, to be educated, to be aware. Slavery began with selling enemies and captives, the “other,” to foreigners, the Holocaust began with patches on clothing, internment camps began by moving American citizens of Japanese descent away from military zones. Humans always find a way of shutting our eyes to reality and looking for the good, it’s how individuals survive, but not how societies thrive.

One of the reminders we need as students, adults, teachers and leaders is how much time it took us to learn everything that we have learned about humans and history and how much we still have to learn. My student, Donald Trump, and I have all fallen into this same trap of, “But I already know about slavery.” What we forget is first that not everyone knows about it, we had to learn about it at some point, and second, that “knowing” about slavery is a term without nuance. Knowing can be an acknowledgement of its existence, but knowing from a chapter in a history book or a movie, and knowing from experience or knowing as part of one’s family history, or knowing about life before slavery, the resistance, the rapes, the passing as white, sharecropping, the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the splitting up of families, the untraceable family trees, Jim Crow Laws, racism in the South, racism in other regions against other races, race riots, racial tensions between various marginalized people, colonization, colorism, “repatriation” and return to Africa movements, redlining, economic segregation, voluntary social segregation…we can know all of these and still be ignorant of one woman’s personal ties and experiences and depths of being. While for me personally, Homegoing felt like a review of a compilation of a breadth of my own knowledge and experiences, garnered not just from a lifetime of books, but from having lived and learned in West Africa for five years, and having the honor of working on projects including Black Rootedness: 54 Poets from Africa to America, I needed this reminder that my son was only in elementary school when he was in West Africa. HIs experience and his knowledge are different from mine. His teacher’s experience would be as well. 

While I love the scene in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry where Cassie and her brothers sneak out at lunch to dig a ditch in the mud that breaks the axle of the bus in which the driver purposefully splashed them with mud while the white kids laughed and hurled racial slurs at them, I doubt that real life children would have been so daring. But we need that fiction too. I personally prefer to teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry to middle grade students because it does give us both the history and an escapism from the history. It blends the ugly truths with delightful, empowered characters in a loving and educated family. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is the spoon full of sugar helping the medicine go down. Sugar-coating history is appropriate for children and yes, it’s more pleasant for adults, but sugar-coating isn’t reality.

We need to read the tragedies and the fantasies. We need to see how the world is and how the world could be. We need to take our stories to imaginary worlds to tell them in ways that others can more easily digest. We need to rewrite our endings. We need to ground our stories in their actual real historical context to understand the allegories. We need all the stories.

Books for Further Exploration

Realism

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Fantasy / Magical Realism 

Abeni’s Song by P. Djeli Clark

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi

Song of the Ituri by Meg Pierce (Coming Soon) 

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Poetry

Black Rootedness: 54 Poets from Africa to America

Non-Fiction / Memoir

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah